Intro/Question:

Tardigrades also known as water bears are microorganisms that eat rotifers and nematodes and are found predominantly in moss and lichen. It is not known how exactly tardigrades evolved to have cryptobiosis which protects the tardigrade when in an unfavorable environment or climate. The question of how tardigrades evolved to have such an important aspect was looked at in this experiment. Our research question was, “Does local adaptation to dryness of environment affect survival rates?”

Discussion:

We found that the difference of location (wetland & upland) does not affect the tardigrades survival rates

We decided that local adaptation is not present to protect against desiccation as the survival rates did not differ. If local adaptation was present we would see higher survival rates in one location as those tardigrades would have adapted to survive desiccation better.

Future research could be conducted comparing upland and wetland samples to see if a different selective pressure like freezing temperatures allowed for cryptobiosis to evolve

The results of the goodness of fit test fail to reject the null hypothesis, this implies there is no significant difference in survival rates of tardigrades between the dry area and wet area.